How to Built the Worlds's Finest Cutting Tool?

CMT builts their foundations - and their reputation for high quality - on the craftsman-like manufacturing of boring bits and router bits. Times have changed and technology has completely altered the way things are done, and in this regard, CMT is no exception. CMT facilities have been newly renovated and their equipment today represents the most advanced technology available on the market, but they still make and will continue to make routers and boring bits with all the skill and care that they always have.

DESIGN

CMT engineer each tool with a purpose in mind. Years of developing high-performance tools mean that many of their top-selling tools are tried and true, the result of continuously perfecting each design, but they don’t stop there.

New materials, new profiles and new methods of working keep emerging. At CMT, they want to stay on the cutting edge of what’s new in the industry so their technical department constantly evaluates current market developments and, by using state of the art software and years of experience, designs tools that are worthy of the CMT brand.

MATERIALS

Essentially, the main components of a router bit are just two: steel and carbide. If either of these is less than the best, the tool they make will show it. They’ve researched steel and carbide since the beginning, and found exactly what they were looking for.

Superior steel
All their steel comes from right above the border, in Switzerland, where they use an exclusive hot drawing process to forge the solid bar stock they use to manufacture their router bit shanks and bodies. The result is steel that is superior in strength and exceptionally resistant to fatigue and abrasion.

High-Grade Tungsten Carbide
If steel is what gives their tools strength, carbide is what gives them intelligence. The capacity of the carbide tip to cut precisely and to last a long time is critical for the performance of any tool, so at CMT they use only premium micro-grain carbide from Luxembourg to make the tips for our router bits.

MANUFACTURING

Turning, Milling and Cutting
Their biggest investment in recent years has been in upgrading production. Today, all machinery at CMT is fully automated. CNC machines run by specially trained operators who make sure that the shanks and bodies of their router bits and boring bits are accurate and perfectly balanced.

Heat Forged Steel Bodies for Large Diameter Bits. No router bits are exactly the same, sometimes not even in the way they are made. Certain bits require a few more steps than others, like heat forging the steel of larger diameter bits before turning it down into precise bit bodies. This extra step produces a radial grain orientation which gives large diameter bits extra strength and durability.

Brazing
They have pioneered the art of brazing. Not only does their unique custom-designed computerized brazing equipment help eliminate the inconsistencies found in old-fashioned hand brazing, but their silver-copper-silver brazing ‘sandwich’ provides a tight bond between the steel and the carbide, with a shock absorbing effect to protect the carbide tips when cutting harder woods.

Specially Formulated Carbide for Specific Applications. You have to cut every kind material, so they make sure that their carbide tips can handle each individual job. This means specially formulating the carbide of each tool so that the compositions vary from being super hard (for tough cutting jobs like laminates) to being less hard (to absorb the impact when cutting large profiles) and everything in between.

Grinding and Sharpening
The final step in the production process is no different from the rest: sharpening and grinding are done to extreme precision on multi-axis CNC machines. Each bevel and angle is ground or sharpened to the micron, to produce a cutting edge that is both razor sharp yet extremely durable.

QUALITY CONTROL

In even the most carefully done task, there’s always room for error. However, at CMT, they take measures to prevent even this. They always manually check the quality of their tools at each step of the manufacturing process, and they still make test cuts with rail & stile bits to make sure the cut fits. However, now they also use a fully automatic measuring process that measures every dimension of the tool without actually coming into contact with it, to make sure that the tool measurements are accurate and that the profiles conform precisely to technical specifications. They also use this system to gauge the wear and tear on the CNC machines.